[mythtv-users] Another ECS Liva Review

[Steven Adeff]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 9:20 PM, Kirk Bocek <t004 at kbocek.com> wrote:
> Well, the beginning of one. I haven't even gotten to the Myth stuff yet.
>
> But the hardware is cute. Basically an X86 Raspberry Pi. And at $100 it's
> pretty close in price to a Raspberry Pi once you add storage, case, power,
> wifi, etc. to the Pi. All that is included with the Liva.
>
> My first hurdle was that this device is UEFI booting only. Whatever distro
> you pick must be relatively recent. My problem was that my preferred install
> method is to PXE boot into the installer. However UEFI require a specific
> PXE setup. This might help those needing to reconfigure their server:
>
> https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/s1-netboot-pxe-config-efi.html
>
> Yeah, it's from Redhat, but the tools are pretty generic. I found my
> efidefault file needed to be in the root directory of the tftp server.
>
> The other hurdle is that UEFI booting uses GRUB and not the older PXE
> notation. You'll need to adapt to it in your efidefault file.
>
> So after getting that working, I found my preferred distro, CentOS, did not
> recognize the built in storage. Both CentOS 6 and CentOS 7. A short thread
> here:
>
> https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=53524
>
> The eMMC chips are just not recognized. So, being comfortable with Redhat, I
> installed Fedora 21. It recognized the chips just fine and Fedora21-Server
> installed without complaint.
>
> So now I struggle with Fedora. The server package seems to be missing most
> of the xorg-x11 packages and much of the desktop stuff. We soldier on.

Purchased two for my parents setup, they've been wanting to add two
more frontends for a while now and with the Newegg sale price it was
too good to pass up. I got Ubuntu 14.04 running on both and after some
small hiccups have finally got them working great. One is running on
an old monitor using stereo analog output in the garage and the other
is connected to their older Sony 1080i TV with analog audio output. In
testing however, we had one plugged into their Denon receiver
connected to their 65" 1080p Samsung plasma with HDMI 5.1 audio.
They've worked great on all these systems, though the picture quality
is nowhere near the VDPAU quality of the NVIDIA graphics card that
normally drives the Samsung. But the interface is fast enough and no
major hiccups during playback.


-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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